Offering constructive criticism to the social cripples in our midst since early 2005.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
I am, for rights not tyranny. that said I hope the state of NH shoves its tyrannical arm up Souter's ass and rips his fucking tongue out. And then takes his land.

And yet earlier you were whining about not getting another Bush appointee. You guys can't make up your minds about anything...

[SlaveNoMore]

taxwonk
It would be clear except for the specific language in Section 8 saying no use of US armed forces. One of the canons of statutory construction is that specific language controls over more general language.

Clearly.

Do they interpret "except as provided [above]" differently in the Tax Code?

This could explain my "C" in Tax.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
So what?

AAAARRRRRGGHHHH!!!!

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
AAAARRRRRGGHHHH!!!!

The argument seems to be that Bush II and Clinton both thought that Iraq posed the same threat to U.S. interests, but that Bush had the resolve and cojones to do something about it. This is supposed to absolve Bush of all blame for the fact that so much of the case for war turned out not to be true.

The argument is just plain stupid. Bush I and Clinton followed the containment strategy. In their assessment, the costs and risks associated with invading Iraq were not worth the projected benefits. Bush II plainly evaluated the situation differently. In his public statements, he made the case that Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq threatened the U.S. with WMD. We now know this was wrong.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
So what?

It means that all of the problems stemming from the invasion of Iraq -- like every other current difficulty we face, domestic, foriegn, economic and social -- are All Clinton's Fault. See, he was President when Congress passed this resolution, so he must have been thinking about putting boots on the ground, so how can you blame GWB & Co. for invading Iraq on a false pretext? Got it?

As a corollary, all Good Things come from the current administration.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
And yet earlier you were whining about not getting another Bush appointee. You guys can't make up your minds about anything...

I want Sup Ct. justices who are Federalists. What is so hard to understand?

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Bush II plainly evaluated the situation differently. In his public statements, he made the case that Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq threatened the U.S. with WMD. We now know this was wrong.

How do we know that Iraq did not threaten us with WMDs? I do not know this and I would bet a sizeable percentage of the 59M who affirmed Bush's leadership on the war on terror don't know this either.

This ain't the DU Ty!

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
How do we know that Iraq did not threaten us with WMDs? I do not know this and I would bet a sizeable percentage of the 59M who affirmed Bush's leadership on the war on terror don't know this either.

While many Americans are still unclear about this, not least because the White House continues to try to give them the wrong impression, those of us who have bothered to read about the various investigations following the war know that there were no WMD and was no threat to us.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
So what?

What he's trying to say is that Chalabi is a good lobbyist and that the Rs are overly influenced by the misinformation fed them by foreign adventurers.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
How do we know that Iraq did not threaten us with WMDs? I do not know this and I would bet a sizeable percentage of the 59M who affirmed Bush's leadership on the war on terror don't know this either.

This ain't the DU Ty!

I thought that W didn't base his policy on the opinions of focus groups.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
While many Americans are still unclear about this, not least because the White House continues to try to give them the wrong impression, those of us who have bothered to read about the various investigations following the war know that there were no WMD and was no threat to us.

dissent. I read about the various investigations, I just don't read books.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
AAAARRRRRGGHHHH!!!!

Jesse Helms, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, commented:

"This bill will begin the long-overdue process of ousting Saddam. It will not send in U.S. troops or commit American forces in any way."

According to Senator Bob Kerrey:

"Second, this bill is not a device to involve the U.S. military in operations in or near Iraq. The Iraqi revolution is for Iraqis, not Americans, to make. "

Some interesting reading:

However, according to clandestineradio.com (http://www.clandestineradio.com/dossier/iraq/mess.htm), "U.S. Congress also pursued a bill dubbed the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998 to force the White House into supporting the INC. Passed with bipartisan support, it promised the INC US$97 million in aid to create an administrative infrastructure fund broadcasting efforts, and also to buy light armaments. The President and his advisers, however, were not amused. Bill Clinton dragged his heels for weeks before signing the bill, and once signed on December 31, 1998, it languished in layers of bureaucracy in Foggy Bottom. Without cash, the INC could not begin to rebuild itself yet the U.S. Department of State refused to disburse the funding.

"In fact, only US$20,000 had been provided between January 1999 and July 2000 to train three Iraqi exiles in non-lethal measures at the Pentagon. If provided with funding, Ahmed Chalabi told U.S. Congressmen on June 28, 2000, 'we can begin humanitarian relief projects within 45 days and begin broadcasting operations in less than 30.'

"'I cannot understand why President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act when he had absolutely no intention of implementing the provisions of that law,' Sam Brownback, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on the Near East, commented during a 2000 hearing on the issue. Chalabi, speaking during the hearing, went even further, saying that the INC has been 'routinely disparaged by adminstration officials from the National Security Council (NSC), the CIA, the State Department and the Department of Defense. And, while blaming the victim may provide temporary political cover for betrayal of US interests, ideals and commitments, it has done little for the confidence of the Iraqi people or Iraq's neighbors.'"


http://www.sourcewatch.org/wiki.phtm...on_Act_of_1998

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
dissent. I read about the various investigations, I just don't read books.

Which investigation found the WMD? Are you thinking about mobile biological laboratories that turned out to be ice cream trucks or the nuclear missiles that turned out to be sewage pipes?

According to Bush's chief inspector, Clinton's air strikes finished off Saddam's WMD capacity:

• The Art of Camouflage
  David Kay comes clean, almost.
  By Fred Kaplan
  Posted Monday, Jan. 26, 2004, at 2:41 PM PT
  
  David Kay's remarks over the weekend—that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction before the war and that U.S. intelligence agencies missed the signs that would have told them as much—held few surprises for anyone who'd closely read his official report on the matter last October. (Click here for one such close reading.)
  
  Kay was the CIA's chief weapons inspector until he resigned last week. The difference between his report of last fall and his statements of recent days is that he was still on the Bush administration's payroll when he wrote the former and a free agent when he made the latter. It's the difference between obfuscation and clarity—political allegiance and public candor.
  
  The discrepancy is not so much a comment on David Kay or George W. Bush as a general caution on how to read official reports.
  
  For example, in an interview conducted late Saturday and published in today's New York Times, Kay says, "I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction. We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on."
  
  Iraq's weapons and facilities, he says, had been destroyed in three phases: by allied bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War; by U.N. inspectors in the half-decade after that war; and by President Clinton's 1998 bombing campaign. (Clinton's airstrikes, by now widely forgotten, were even at the time widely dismissed as a political diversion; they took place during the weekend when the House of Representatives voted for impeachment. But according to Kay, they destroyed Iraq's remaining infrastructure for building chemical weapons.) Kay adds that Saddam tried to resuscitate some of these programs, but—due to sanctions, fear of inspections, and lack of resources—he was not able to do so.
  
  Kay made these same points in his report last October, but it was easy to overlook them—in fact, the reader was meant to. Kay didn't exactly lie in the report; the points were there if you looked carefully; but he did his best to camouflage them.
  
  There are tried and true methods to this art of camouflage. The idea is to deploy vague rhetoric and unchallengeable facts that seem menacing at first glance but on close inspection have no significance. The hope is that, if you play this game well enough, nobody will inspect them closely enough to notice.
  
  For instance, Kay began his report by noting that Saddam Hussein's WMD program "spanned more than two decades" and "involved thousands of people and billions of dollars."
  
  You had to read the next several pages to realize that these thousands of people and billions of dollars also "spanned more than two decades"—that, at least since 1991, nowhere near that much money or manpower was involved at any one time. You also have to read on to realize that, whatever the level of endeavor, its results were nil. In short, Kay wasn't lying. But he was setting a diversionary tone, at the top of the report, to please his bosses and give them ammo for sound bites.
  
  Another example: Kay wrote, in a breathless style, that Saddam had set up "a clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service." Buried in the paragraphs to follow was Kay's conclusion that these labs and safehouses didn't produce anything of note. Similarly, the report warned that Saddam "may have engaged" in "research on a possible VX-stabilizer" (italics added), but said nothing about whether he actually developed any such thing or even possessed VX.
  
  My favorite example of Kay's attempt to trump substance with style: Saddam's scientists "began several small and relatively unsophisticated research initiatives … that could have been useful in developing a weapons-relevant science base for the long-term." This description is so vague, it would accurately describe the act of reading a textbook on nuclear physics.
  
  Kay did his job well. His report did not tell lies. But it puffed up enough smoke to let President Bush proclaim it as a justification for the war. Bush cited, with particular enthusiasm, the bit about Saddam's "clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses"—a phrase containing four words designed to raise the hair of anyone who's ever glanced at a spy novel.
  
  Now that Kay has quit, he can tell the same story—but without the smokescreen.
  
  In the Times interview, Kay does add one dimension to his tale—and it is the newest, most intriguing aspect of them all. In the late 1990s, it seems, Saddam took personal control of Iraq's WMD program. As a result, Iraqi scientists started going to him directly with proposals of fanciful weapons systems, for which Saddam paid them heaps of money. As Kay puts it, the WMD program turned into a "vortex of corruption." Saddam was deluded with fantasies; the scientists pocketed the money and filed phony progress reports on fake weapons systems.
  
  Kay says the CIA's biggest failure lay in missing this internal deception. Though the Times piece doesn't say so, it's quite likely that the CIA itself was deceived, intercepting some of these phony reports and treating them as credulously as Saddam did. In any case, in the Times interview, Kay calls for an overhaul in the way the agency processes intelligence.
  
  It is significant that Kay wrote nothing about the Iraqi scientists' deception campaign—and issued no such call for radical reform of the U.S. intelligence community—in his report last October. The omissions are the ultimate indicators that the report's main goal was to please and protect his employer.
  
  Even now, Kay falls short of making a full break with the Bush administration. He continues to state that Iraq was a danger to the world, worth going to war against, even if not for the same reasons that Bush claimed. He tells the Times, "We know that terrorists were passing through Iraq. And now we know that there was little control over Iraq's weapons capabilities. I think it shows that Iraq was a very dangerous place. The country had the technology, the ability to produce, and there were terrorist groups passing through the country—and no central control."
  
  This is a puzzling sequence of non sequiturs. Terrorists may have been passing through, but Kay—who bases his other conclusions on interviews with many Iraqi scientists and examination of many documents—found nothing that suggests any contact between terrorists and scientists. The disarray of Saddam's rule may have meant there was "little control over Iraq's weapons capabilities," but, as Kay says elsewhere, there was also little in the way of Iraqi weapons. Having "the technology" is not the same thing as having the weapons; "the ability to produce" is not the same thing as producing.
  
  It will be interesting to watch where David Kay goes next. On one level, he's come clean, but on another, he's still playing his old games.

Slate

etft

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Which investigation found the WMD? Are you thinking about mobile biological laboratories that turned out to be ice cream trucks or the nuclear missiles that turned out to be sewage pipes?
\

I am not saying any investigation found them, just that none conclusively proved that they did not exist.


Even his statement of candor:

I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction. We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on."

doesn't say there were none, just that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced wmds. Small stockpiles of previously produced chemical or biological weapons could still pose a significant threat.

Next?

Originally posted by Penske_Account
Small stockpiles of previously produced chemical or biological weapons could still pose a significant threat.

Right. If they exist. When did we find the small stockpiles of previously produced weapons?

Ancient zen koan # 482: When is absence of evidence evidence of absence?